Select a region
Charlie Parker’s CEO contract allowed outside jobs, if they were agreed in writing. His job with New River wasn’t agreed in writing, before he started it. So why wasn’t that apparent breach addressed?
It’s a question Express has asked repeatedly, with no answer beyond the now ubiquitous HR brush-off: “We can’t tell you, it’s personal.”
Just three days after the first media enquiry about the New River job, and 19 days after it had actually been formally announced by New River, it was retrospectively approved by the States’ Employment Board. Why?
Express has repeatedly asked for the minutes of that meeting – but they are apparently not available despite being approved on 27 January 2021. The meeting itself was back on 29 October, 2020.
Pictured: The Chief Minister, Senator John Le Fondré, gave verbal approval for the New River job.
With written approval now given, it seems there was no specific disciplinary process which could be used for the CEO, even though the Council of Ministers had decided the extra job he'd taken was "incompatible" – and so it seems the only way out was a payment of £500,000. We’re told the alternative was apparently the possibility of a legal claim from Mr Parker, which could have resulted in a lot more.
The amount itself has been released this morning – completely overshadowing the publication of critical government accounts, as it was always going to do – but the total is not at all surprising. Mr Parker had a couple of years left on his contract, and we know he was paid around £250k a year.
But already Ministers are clinging by their fingertips to the lifejacket given by just one word in the Comptroller and Auditor General’s report into the affair – she says the quantum of the payout given to Mr Parker was “reasonable.”
Reasonable. Reasonable when assessed against the terms of the contract, the lack of any specific disciplinary process which could be followed and the potential risk of litigation. It’s a professional’s word.
Pictured: the C&AG, Lynn Pamment, who said the scale of the payment was reasonable, but identified the lack of a specific disciplinary process for the CEO.
It’s not a word which will be used by the bucolic burghers of Jersey who, apparently, used to ride the bus to work with Mr Parker, an experience he was fond of citing to show how he was ‘keeping it real’ with the true, salt-of-the-côtil, Jersey folk.
If those socially-distanced chats across the backseat of the 1a did happen, you might imagine what would be said this morning.
From a financial technician’s point of view, the scale of the payment was “reasonable.”
But Ms Pamment also draws our attention to the significant flaws in the way the whole process was handled. Mr Parker’s erstwhile travel buddies on the 1a bus may be forgiven for wondering just how many process flaws there are going to be, when we now have a focused, and highly-centralized ministerial system; and some very well paid and experienced senior government officials, all with long experience in the bureaucracy of the UK, who you might expect would know how to do all this. At least that's what the Appointments’ Commission were told.
Pictured: the Vice-chairman of the SEB, Connétable Richard Buchanan.
Back on 10 November, ahead of the confidence vote in the Chief Minister, Express posed three core questions in this column:
The first has still never been answered.
We now know the answer to the second - it was Mr Parker himself, something the Comptroller has today described as a “conflict”. But the CEO misquoting the Deputy Chief Minister apparently isn’t serious enough to trigger any action – or actually, it seems there is just no specific disciplinary process to follow.
But it is the third which is the real nub of the issue, and which directly led to the £500,000 pay off.
We are now exactly six months on from when Express first posed that question, and it still hasn’t been answered.
Equally, despite repeated questioning, we also don't know why the former CEO was given a final (extra) short-term contract to see him through to March this year - the existence of which only emerged following a request under the Freedom of Information Law by this publication.
Well, here’s another question the commuters on the 1a bus may be muttering behind their covid masks at the now empty seat on the back row: how is it that the Government can create perhaps the most powerful role for any officer in its history… but not also have added sufficient checks and balances on that power?
This morning, the Chief Minister dismissed it as just technical teething troubles in a new system. Is that reasonable, too?
